Google Denies Online Censorship Deal with Israel

Google has denied all the accusations that were put forward regarding monitoring or censoring of those YouTube videos that are made for inciting attacks on Israel — Google claims their recent meetings were routine and had no such agreements.

Though, statement from Israeli foreign ministry last week said that the Google’s executives had agreed on introducing a mechanism that will monitor all the activities on YouTube in relation to encouraging attacks on Israel but, a Google’s spokesman said the statement was an error and was corrected later on:

“The Israeli Ministry for Foreign Affairs has corrected its original announcement, which, in error, suggested there had been an agreement with Google to establish a mechanism to monitor online materials,” the spokesperson said.

Israeli government is very happy with the outcomes of the meetings as they believe in Google will monitor all the material that is “dangerous” for their region:

“Extremely grateful for the good relations with Google, our common objective is to remove dangerous incitement to violence on social media andwe have full confidence in the Google teams dealing with this removal.” the government spokesperson said.

In last two month over 100 Palestinians and 17 Israelis are killed in the incidents of stabbing, shooting and car ramming. The Israeli government believes online posts inciting people to get violent are the one to blame for these killings.

In 2013, Google bought a ride-sharing start-up “Waze” in Israel for $1 billion and earlier this year, Waze and Google started a service that connected passengers with a driver who have similar routes. Waze also provides data to the government in relation to the service.

What one can conclude is that Google has a pretty strong presence in Israel and they are likely to oblige to any request from its government let alone the official statement from both the parties.

Pushpa Mishra

Pushpa is a Dubai based scientific academic editor who worked for Reuters' Zawya business magazine and at the same time a passionate writer for HackRead. From the very first day she has been a blessing for team Hackread. Thanks to her dedication and enthusiasm.

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